Heavenly Creatures

Goodness, this was an awful film, featuring some of the least believable characters ever to grace the screen. Directed by anyone besides Peter Jackson, this wouldn't have made it to DVD. Instead, we're treated to a movie that reeks of film-school pretentiousness when it isn't earnestly depicting some weird victorian notion of femininity I didn't think still existed in the collective consciousness. It's a shame, really...the story is interesting, and given a less absurd retelling it might make a decent film.

This story is a bit disturbing. It cronicles the friendship between two girls who have noone else but each other. It was a really well done story, based on the true events of these same girls. I guess the most disturbing part is the fact that they truely thought that taking the life of the one girls mother would actually keep them together.

This is the film where Peter Jackson really showed he had "arrived". An astonishingly assured and original film based on a notorious New Zealand murder case from the 1950s. A very young Kate Winslet is superb and so is Melanie Lynskey as her impressionable friend. Easily the best New Zealand film ever made.

HEAVENLY CREATURES is an insane love story. Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey's characters burn for each other w/ a blind passion rarely seen on film. Doomed to be apart, and unable to survive separately, the two concoct a sinister (to us) plan to ensure their bond forever (in their world). Both Winslet and Lynskey portray these girls as if they are actually wearing their skins! Played against the backward, self-righteous backdrop of 1950s smalltown New Zealand (Christchurch to be exact), these girls appear to be even more alien. Peter Jackson's version of their interior, "fourth world" lives is astounding! The living-clay people are seemless. I have no idea how he did it! A complete masterwork of dark fantasy film-making. Even knowing the grim outcome, I still find myself hoping for the impossible to happen, for these girls to be together forever...

The Bottom Line: Featuring two convincing performances from its young leads, a scrupulous attention to detail, and inventive direction, Heavenly Creatures is a powerful and incisive look into events that happened in New Zealand 50 years ago.

"Heavenly Creatures" was Peter Jackson's breakout film. It's an amazing contrast--with its small scale and documentary style--to the epic extravaganza of "The Lord of the Rings." What makes the story powerful is that it tells the true story of Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) and Julie Hulme (Kate Winslet,having beginner's luck before Titanic) The girls were infamous for the matricide in Christchurch in 1954. "Heavenly Creatures" powerfully blends the realistic with the fantastical. The two isolated girls create their own "Fourth World"--where Mario Lanza sings,they're princesses,and there are no Christians. Their close friendship becomes closer in the erotic sense as well--they bathe together,they kiss,they ask the permission of a male "saint" to be intimate with each other. They come from dysfunctional families. Parker's parents aren't married-a scandal at the time- and Hulme's parents are divorcing. As their families disintegrate, Julie and Pauline become obsessed with each other... Read more